Category Archives: Religious Persecution

Religious persecution is the practice of discouraging freedom of religion and the freedom to express and/or promote all or certain religious beliefs – with repercussions ranging from prevention to persecution (including murder).

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Third worship place threatened with demolition.

LOS ANGELES, June 27 (Compass Direct News) – Vietnamese officials in Muong Cha district, Dien Bien Province, destroyed two new church buildings of ethnic minority Hmong Christians this month and threatened to tear down a third.

The Ho He Church, erected in April by the unregistered Vietnam Good News Mission, was demolished on June 17. The Phan Ho Church of the registered Evangelical Church of Vietnam (North) was destroyed on June 13, 2012. The church threatened with demolition, The Cong Church, also belongs to the Vietnam Good News Mission.

These congregations of 500 to 600 people, which began as house churches, had long outgrown even the largest home, so the Hmong had sacrificed and worked to erect wooden worship buildings. As local police, paramilitary forces and other authorities descended on the church buildings by the dozens, the Christians could only watch with deep sadness and frustration as the houses of worship were reduced to rubble and government promises about freedom of religion were again broken, area sources said.

The Hmong Christian movement in Vietnam’s Northwest Mountainous Region has grown from nothing to some 400,000 believers in the last two decades. The Hmong Christians remain under heavy government suspicion and are regularly objects of harassment and sometimes outright persecution.

According to a trusted Compass source, these incidents, among other things, demonstrate the dysfunction of the government’s church registration regime. New regulations on church registration were promulgated in 2004 and 2005, ostensibly to expand religious freedom and move Vietnam from an ideological opposition to religion to a managerial approach.

Particularly promising was the Prime Minister’s Special Directive No. 1 Regarding Protestantism. It promised quick registration for local congregations to carry on religious activity while larger issues were being worked out.

Since this legislation appeared, nine Protestant denominations have received legal recognition. They report that the disclosure required in the registration process, however, has led to more government scrutiny and has not reduced long waiting times for routine permissions.

Yet more than half of Vietnam’s Protestants remain unregistered, with many seeing their prospects for becoming legally recognized as hopeless. Hundreds of congregations have tried to apply for registration under the Prime Minister’s Special Directive, only to have officials simply refuse to accept the applications. Others who apply to register are told they cannot because they are not legal, or that they can’t register because there are no Christians where they live.

If the registration request is received, sources said, it often goes unanswered for years, contrary to time limits for government reply in the legislation. Christian leaders who have long tried to register their congregations say that fewer than 5 percent have been granted permission to carry on religious activities.

As a result, sources said, large numbers of congregations remain subject to various kinds of harassment and sometimes arbitrary closure. Authorities tell denominational leaders they may not visit their churches, or even their pastors, because they are not legal.

The large Catholic Church in Vietnam regularly finds its congregations in tension with local authorities. On June, 18, for example, the archdiocese of Vinh published on a Catholic website a letter, directed to all levels of government, about the persecution of Christians in Chau Binh Commune in Nghe An Province.

When a priest arrived in the commune to bless a new home, many officials gathered to prevent the ceremony. They shouted abuse at the Catholics and hurled rotten eggs at an altar prepared for the house-blessing ceremony. The following night, thugs invaded the home of Tran Van Luong, a Catholic who had dared object to the officials’ conduct, and beat him, his wife and three others, sources said.

The five required emergency medical aid, and Luong’s wife was still drifting in and out of consciousness at the time the letter was written.

The letter from the archdiocese specifies in detail how the officials’ conduct violates the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the constitution of Vietnam, as well as Vietnam’s new religion legislation and its criminal code. It concludes with an appeal for a prompt investigation to provide justice.

Rarely does the government of Vietnam respond to such petitions, sources said; instead, it often vilifies the petitioners.

An official news release on a high-level meeting about the effectiveness of the Prime Minister’s Special Directive No. 1, issued on Feb. 28 in Vietnamese, was likely more telling than intended; the official English-language report on the meeting used other language entirely. In the Vietnamese version, an official of the Government Committee on Religious Affairs said the directive had provided a “breakthrough” in the government’s management of religion by “limiting the unusually rapid development of the Protestant religion.”

Thus, the very instrument that was publicized locally and internationally as proof of Vietnam’s liberalizing religion policy apparently had contrary purposes.

At the same meeting, a deputy prime minister announced the appointment of General Pham Dung of the Ministry of Public Security as the new head of the Government Committee on Religious Affairs. According to Vietnamese Protestant leaders, this was not a heartening development.

Vietnam was ranked 19th on the 2012 World Watch List of the 50 countries where persecution is worst, as determined by Christian support organization Open Doors.

– Vietnamese Officials Destroy Two New Church Buildings, Compass Direct News, June 27, 2012 — SOURCE Published in Religion News Blog by permission.

Members of Lao military dismissed for embracing Christian faith

DUBLIN, June 25 (Compass Direct News) – Lao officials arrested two Lao and two Thai Christians in Luang Namtha Province earlier this month, seizing them from a private residence in Long district, according to Human Rights Watch for Lao Religious Freedom (HRWLRF).

Officials also arrested a pastor in Luang Namtha and dismissed two civil servants in Savannakhet for converting to Christianity, HRWLRF reported.

An HRWLRF source told Compass today that officials have charged the two Lao and two Thai Christians arrested on June 16 in Luang Namtha with “spreading the Christian faith without official approval.”

“That is ironic, since Lao officials are highly unlikely to approve of anyone spreading the Christian faith,” said another source who requested anonymity.

A resident of Phone Sampan village in Long district who witnessed Thai brothers Jonasa and Phanthakorn Wiwatdamrong explaining Bible passages to enquirers in a private home reported their presence to police. Police then raided the home, confiscating the brothers’ passports along with biblical literature and Christian CDs, according to HRWLRF.

The brothers, along with two local residents, one identified by the single name Chalar and the other as yet unidentified, were then arrested and taken directly to Luang Namtha provincial prison. Under normal procedure, detainees would be held in a village or district prison for 36 hours during a preliminary investigation before transferring to provincial facilities, according to HRWLRF.

Officials seem determined to eliminate Christianity from the province, local sources told HRWLRF. In one case, police on June 6 arrested a pastor identified by the single name Asa following reports that he had encouraged many people in Sing district to accept Christ.

Two years ago, police arrested Asa and forced him to sign documents agreeing not to share his faith with others – but so many have turned to Christ this year as a result of Asa’s influence that officials ordered a second arrest.

Elsewhere, the military commander of Phin district, Savannakhet Province, on June 14 discharged two members of the Alowmai village security force, identified by the single names Khamsorn and Tonglai, for converting to Christianity, according to HRWLRF.

The two men became Christians in late May, as did other family members shortly thereafter. Alowmai’s chief immediately reported the conversions to the chief of police in Chudsume sub-district, who replied that under Lao law, the men had every right to believe in the religion of their choice.

The village chief then reported the conversions to Phin district’s military commander, who subsequently discharged Khamsorn and Tonglai and confiscated their military-issue firearms.

HRWLRF has called on the Lao government to respect the right of these and other Lao citizens to religious freedom as guaranteed by the constitution and other national laws, and by international covenants ratified by the Republic.

Amid global euphoria over reforms in Burman-majority parts of Burma, life has changed little for more than 3 million Christians and other minorities left to suffer from one of the world’s longest running civil wars.

While it is largely a struggle for self-determination in all ethnic states and all civilians suffer in the crossfire, the Burman-Buddhist dominated Burmese troops are often accused of being harsher on Christian civilians than on their Buddhist counterparts. [Read more...]

Christians faced increased hostilities in Sudan over the past few weeks, culminating in an attack on a Christian compound in Khartoum by a throng of Muslim extremists armed with clubs, iron rods, a bulldozer and fire.

Breaking down the compound wall with a bulldozer, the assailants set fire to the Gerief West Bible School and the Sudan Presbyterian Evangelical Church (SPEC) building; they also damaged three other places of worship and other buildings in the same compound. [Read more...]

A recent “reconciliation meeting” between members of a Muslim mob that attacked a Christian-owned school in Egypt and school administrators was nothing less than an attempt at legalized extortion, the director of the school said.

In exchange for peace, members of the sword-wielding mob that stormed the school last month without provocation – and held two nuns hostage for several hours – initially demanded in the meetings that the school sign over parcels of land that include the guesthouse the Muslim extremists attacked. [Read more...]

The mother of a 6-month-old girl has been wrongly jailed for more than a month, as Pakistani authorities have failed to file a charge sheet within the mandatory 14-day period against the young Christian woman falsely accused of “blaspheming” the prophet of Islam, her attorney said. [Read more...]